May 7, 2017: Coal Executives Screwed Miners - Sen. Mitch McConnell Wants Taxpayers to Pay the Bill

 5/7/17: Senator McConnell spends the day brushing up his prose for an Op-Ed article which will appear in the Washington Examiner. 

In coal country, meanwhile, we learn life is good for executives, maybe not so good for miners. Peabody Energy has gone bankrupt, which Fox News blames on Obama. Glen Kellow, who ran the company, receives a $15 million stock bonus payout. Previously, Peabody paid its top executive team $75 million (2012-2014), while losing $2 billion. In 2016 Alpha Natural Resources granted $12 million in bonuses to executives, in recognition of their sterling efforts in 2015, when the company lost $1.3 billion. 

Arch Coal executives earned $8 million in bonuses three days before the company declared bankruptcy.

__________ 

“You couldn’t say nothing.”

__________ 

 

Meanwhile, pay for a United Mine Workers of America union member averages $61,650, closer to $85,000 with overtime. But only 2% of miners are unionized, down from 40% in the 90s. Non-union miners make far less. Carlos Combs, 64, a third-generation miner, lost a union job twenty years ago. Of jobs with non-unionized operators, which are all he can find, he says, “You couldn’t say nothing. You had to take what they gave you.” Eventually, he developed black lung. 

According to The New York Times there’s a bit of good news for men like Combs. Or their widows. “Congress…reached a last-minute deal this week to finance health benefits for more than 20,000 retired miners – miners whose employers have long gone bankrupt, leaving taxpayers to pick up the tab.” 

In his op-ed article the next day, McConnell will bend reality in astonishing fashion. He writes: 

Last week, we achieved the success that thousands of retired coal miners and their families so desperately needed with the passage of my proposal [emphasis added]. And with President Trump’s signature, it is now law. You may recall that at the end of December, their health benefits were set to expire. If Congress had not acted, approximately 3,000 Kentucky coal miner retirees – and tens of thousands more around the country – would have seen their healthcare benefits end. After years of hard work in the coal mines, they deserved better than having to suffer as collateral damage of former President Barack Obama’s War on Coal.

 

Representing coal-dependent West Virginia, Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito agrees. Congress must find a permanent solution. “These men and women worked hard in dangerous situations to power America and were promised lifetime health care benefits in return.” 

In other words, Americans deserve help with health insurance if they are represented by Republican senators. 

And why did healthcare funds for miners dry up? Maybe, because top company executives were greedy.

 

POSTSCRIPT: This liberal blogger is happy to see miners’ healthcare coverage protected. He does wonder, however, how this doesn’t rile up the Republicans, who purport to hate “socialized medicine.” 

Also, f**k those greedy coal barons, who have been screwing their non-union miners in every way they possibly can.

February 15, 2021: Texas Power Grid Collapses - Red State Politicians Blame Democrats!

 

2/15/21: A powerful winter storm slams Texas and large swaths of the Great Plains. Temperatures plunge. Numbskulls insist that a few record-cold days prove climate change is fake. 

Someone should point them to the list of the ten hottest years recorded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for help.

 

One of the numbest skulls belongs to first-term Republican congresswoman, Rep. Lauren Boebert. With winter weather slamming the Plains, she figures out what has happened, tweeting: 

Rolling blackouts from ND to TX have turned into lengthy power outages in freezing conditions.

 

Biden needs to lift his oil & gas ban as we need reliable energy sources.

 

The Green New Deal was just proven unsustainable as renewables are clearly unreliable.

 

This is particularly dumb, even for Boebert, who habitually sounds dumb, because: 

A.    Zero elements of the Green New Deal have been enacted.

B.     She might just as well have blamed the outages on Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

C.    Heavy snow and ice storms like the one that just hit tend to knock out power lines.

D.   Downed lines are the problem. The current outages have little to do with how much power is available.

E.     The U.S. achieved “energy independence,” broadly defined, a few years ago. So we don’t lack energy.

F.     We became a net exporter of natural gas in 2017.

G.    President Trump (speaking of numbskulls) bragged in  2019 about his success in this regard, saying, “We are independent and we do not need Middle East oil.”

 

In scrolling through Twitter, however, I discover that Texas Sen. John Cornyn sounds equally numb in the cranium. 

His tweet on the storm reads: “Rolling blackouts in Texas and spiking gas and power prices amid a cold snap show the folly of eliminating natural gas – and coal.” 

In the real world, where this blogger tries to live, it is factually correct to say that no one has eliminated natural gas production at all; plus, coal production has fallen because prices for natural gas and even wind and solar have dropped below the cost of mining coal. So the blackouts in Texas have nothing to do with what President Biden or the Democrats might eventually do. (See: 2/24/21.) 

 

POSTSCRIPT: You may recall President Trump’s promise to end the “War on Coal” and save tens of thousands of coal mining jobs. 

During his four years in office, the number of jobs in the mines continued to decline. Coal production was lower in 2019 than in any year since 1978. This decline was not the fault of Mr. Trump. Then again, neither was the decline under his predecessor, although Trump said it was.

Trump is Winning the Imaginary War on Coal

AS A FORMER HISTORY TEACHER, I try to stick to proven facts on my blog. For example, I rarely quote Democratic politicians when I’m mocking President Trump. That would be like shooting obese orange fish in a puddle.

If you want to make fun of Trump, facts always suffice.

So, today, I thought it might be fun to consider the gory “War on Coal,” declared, as near I can tell, by “Muslim Obama.”

Luckily, right-wingers have Trump and all the other freedom fighters at Fox News to save our coal and also save our tinsel in the equally terrible, “War on Christmas.” 

That war was also declared by President Barack Hussein (“Did We Mention He’s A Muslim”) Obama.

By the way, if you believe in facts and not in Santa Claus, Obama isn’t a Muslim

And if you truly believed in equality, you might have the sense to know it wouldn’t matter if he was.

But today’s focus is not on Muslims, or liberals who want to kill and eat Donner and Blizten! Today, we are focusing on the “War on Coal!” If we can go back to the days of St. Ronald of Reagan, we know for sure there were no Muslims in the Oval Office and we can be equally sure that coal miners had a friend in the White House. Okay, maybe not a friend of coal miners’ unions.

Whatever! Let’s move on.

At least, St Ronald never declared war on coal. Bureau of Labor Statistics (which only go back to 1985 on the chart I can find) show that in January 1985 there were 170,500 coal miners at work in this great country.

Under Obama, that number fell to 50,700 in January 2017, that dirty bastard! Hey, did the right-wingers mention lately, he was born in Kenya????

So: BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, Obama.

Machinery replaced men with picks and shovels.

LET’S PUT UP A FEW MORE NUMBERS to shed some real light on your typical Fox News talking point. By January 1989, when Reagan’s second term ended, only 136,400 coal miners were still at work. That meant there had been a loss of 34,100 jobs in the mines; but this was not a war on coal. 

Nope.

Reagan loved miners. Obama hated them because he was a communist, not to mention a Muslim.

I know. That combination doesn’t make sense; but we are employing Fox News logic here and we are focusing on the “War on Coal!”

Luckily, America elected another Republican, George H. W. Bush in 1988. By January 1993, when he left office, the number of coal miners hard at work had risen…I mean, fallen…to 112,400.

Scratch another 24,000 coal mining jobs.

Next came Bill Clinton. By the time he finished his eight years in office, having chased Monica Lewinsky around the Oval Office until she was dizzy, only 71,300 coal miners remained. That meant another 41,100 jobs lost, not as bad as the combined jobs lost in the eight previous years under Republican leadership.

Still, if you were a miner, the trend lines really sucked; and as a good liberal, my sympathies always go to the working stiffs.

Under George W. Bush, coal mining rebounded, and everything was great in America again. Well, not counting when the entire economy crashed in 2008. You remember that great time—when the economy shed 3,889,000 jobs between February 2008 and the end of January 2009. 

Of course, fracking hadn’t caught on and the price of natural gas wasn’t undercutting the price of coal yet. From January 2001 through January 2009, jobs in the coal mines rose to 86,400. So that would be a gain of fifteen thousand plus.

Then came the “War on Coal,” launched for nefarious, flag-hating, un-American reasons by tree-hugging libtards, led by Commie Obama, or Muslim Obama, take your right-wing pick. 

And three years later, even with a recession to wrestle, coal mining jobs had increased to 89,700. In other words, Obama had declared war on coal and then coal jobs, for three years, still increased.

Only then did the decline set in again.

When President Obama left office in January 2017, only 50,700 coal mining jobs remained. That meant in his eight years in office, 35,700 coal miners died in bloody imaginary warfare, compared to 58,100 miners wiped out during St. Ronald of Reagan’s second term and George H. W. Bush’s single term.

IN OTHER WORDS, if you cared about facts, you had to ask: Did St. Ronald of Reagan hate coal miners himself?

I wasn’t able to find Bureau of Labor Statistics charts for the years before 1985; but this chart from WikiCommons makes clear the grim historical trends. The scale makes it hard to read. But it would appear there were roughly 250,000 coal miners at work in January 1981, when St. Ronald took charge.

And that would make him by far the biggest killer of coal mining jobs (roughly 115,000 during his two terms) in the last forty years.

The reality—if you have at least one eyeball that functions and you do more than stare at the leggy babes on Fox News—there never has been a “war” on coal. The trends  for decades, including the decline of the United Mine Workers, which Republicans have always cheered, have been running strongly against the miners and the miners’ families. The trends have been crippling states where mining once supported towns and entire counties and provided good-paying employment to those who preferred not to go to college and get degrees in teaching or engineering or computer science.

But if you had tried to blame Obama for a “War on Buggies,” your argument would make about as much sense.

There was no “War on Coal.” There wasn’t even a skirmish. 

Harsh economic changes were at work. Improved machinery and methods of extraction killed hundreds of thousands of mining jobs, starting a century ago. Changes in mining methods—from deep mining to hilltop leveling—killed tens of thousands more. And the decline in demand for coal has meant the elimination of many jobs that remained. The prices of solar power and natural gas have both fallen dramatically in recent years. And no president, not St. Ronald, not Obama, and not the big orange blimp in the White House today, is going to be able to turn back an this unfortunate historical clock.

You knew, for example, that coal was in terrible trouble, not because of President Obama, but because of changing realities when the Kentucky Coal Museum installed eighty solar panels on its roof in 2017.

Again, there never was any “War on Coal.” 

You couldn’t win it because it wasn’t being fought. It was more like a “War on Reality” waged by Trump and Fox News.

*

Has there been a slight uptick in jobs under Donald J. Trump. I mean for coal miners, not lawyers to defend him in court?

Yes. We now have 53,200 miners at work, a bump up of 2,500.

By contrast, the U.S. Department of Energy reported last year that there were 373,807 people working in the solar energy field. (See page 29 of the DOE report.) So, you could argue, if you wished to distort economics that President Trump declared “War on the Sun” when he imposed tariffs on imported Chinese solar panels earlier this year.

To understand how bogus the “War on Coal”  has always been all you really have to do is look at the facts.

And try to think.

POSTSCRIPT: AS A GUY WHO SUPPORTS good pay for workers, I understand exactly why coal miners are mad.

As a liberal, I wish they’d all unionize tomorrow (only about 3 percent are unionized today) and strike for better wages and benefits the next day. 

I wish a lot of workers would unionize and fight for higher pay. I wish the average coal miner, the average teacher, the average butcher, the average baker (whether or not he wants to bake a cake for the gay couple), the average candlestick maker, the average police officer, carpenter, plumber, electrician and teamster would all unionize next week and go on strike nationwide next month.

I wish the billionaires didn’t dominate the economy. I’d be happy if they all stopped hiding their money in secret offshore accounts. 

I wish the billionaires weren’t able, particularly in the wake of the Citizens United court decision (decided, 5-4, by the conservatives justices on the U.S. Supreme Court), to buy up politicians wholesale, like purchasing a quart of milk and a carton of eggs.

I wish guys like Wilbur Ross, our current Commerce Secretary, and Steve Mnuchin, our current Treasury Secretary, didn’t park their dough in places like the Cayman Islands, out of reach of the IRS. 

I wish they didn’t dodge taxes which the rest of us pay.

Last, but not least, I wish the president would release his taxes (apparently under audit for all eternity) so we could find out the truth. Is that chunky fat cat paying as much, percentage-wise, as the average coal miner?

At least the miner who still has a job?